1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an explanatory-description adding apparatus, a computer program product, and an explanatory-description adding method.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, many methods of writing texts (annotations) such as impressions and opinions on video contents in television (TV) programs or digital versatile disks (DVD) as comment information and publicizing the comment information through a network using functions of blogging or bulletin boards are adopted. When the comment information such as impressions and opinions on video contents is publicized to many people using the function of blogging or bulletin boards, the user can communicate with many people via the comment information while viewing the video contents.
However, when writing the comment information as texts, the user in many cases writes texts on a scene that attracts his or her interests while the video contents are playing. In such cases, the user misses the next scene while writing texts, or cannot be concentrated on the video contents when the user pauses the video contents each time the user writes the texts.
Thus, to write the comment information as texts, the user simply bookmarks a scene that attracts his/her interests during viewing of the video contents, and writes comment information (texts) using the bookmark after viewing of the video contents is finished.
Meanwhile, a method of embedding a link to a scene in video contents into the comment information on the video contents to clearly inform the viewers of about which scene the comments concern is also used (for example, see JP-A 2004-364184 (KOKAI)). According to this technique, texts on a scene are displayed together with playing video. Therefore, while viewing video contents, the viewers can see the texts such as impressions and opinions on the scene that is viewed.
When texts such as impressions and opinions on the video contents are written using a bookmark after viewing of the video contents and when only time information is presented as the bookmark, the user has a low probability of determining a scene indicated by the bookmark (time information). When a thumbnail image as well as the time information is presented as a bookmark, the probability of determining a scene indicated by the bookmark (time information and the thumbnail image) becomes higher. In this case, when the thumbnail image is an image including a characteristic person or background, the determination can be easily made. However, since the thumbnail image is not always a discriminative image, the scene indicated by the bookmark (the time information and the thumbnail image) cannot be determined in some cases. When the scene indicated by the bookmark (the time information and the thumbnail image) cannot be determined, the user must check each bookmark to find a desired scene, which decreases convenience.
When a link to a scene in video contents is embedded into the comment information as described in JP-A 2004-364184 (KOKAI), the user can find details of the scene only by visiting the link. Therefore, in many cases, no description on the linked scene is given. Accordingly, when other users read the texts such as impressions or opinions on the video contents, these users cannot understand easily which scene the link represents at a glance.